Cornucopia!

Just a quick post for a Friday, sort of a grab bag of things that have caught my eye.

Over at Free Technology for Teachers Richard Byrne has put together a really nice collection of e-Books about using Google tools in your classroom. Access it here.

Over here, USA Today has an interesting article about professors in the US evaluating the effectiveness of the iPad in classroom settings. It also looks at the larger issue around e-textbooks.

An interesting series of discussions about educational blogging, and uses of blogs as training and development tools is happening over here. [Due diligence, this is also a site that promotes a book called “Edublogging: a qualitative study of training and development bloggers”. I was a classmate of the author, Kristina Schneider. That being said, I would never promote something that I don’t think has value.]

Zonja Capalini is blogging about “The myth of Second Life as a platform for education” which has sparked a series of rebuttals etc. I’m ambivalent about this, I think Second Life is a cool bit of kit, but I am concerned about replicating bad teaching practices with even higher technological barriers to entry. The primary (only?) tool that I’ve seen that mixes Second Life with an LMS or other assessment tools is SLOODLE , by all means go have a look.

Often people see e-learning as having a onesided (the student) benefit and of little benefit for teachers, a report from Boston College seems to put lie to that.

Finally a new tool that has popped up lately is Amplify. It’s another tool, like twitter, that seems to be usable for just about whatever you want to do with it. You can blog with it, do longer twitter-like updates, use email to update it.. A lot of education people are flocking to it, so perhaps it’s worth a look (you can see education related posts by going here).